Politics & Power Quote by Mitt Romney

Romney frames the 2012 election as a choice between two faiths, and he does it with a map. “Capitals of Europe” isn’t geographic detail; it’s a cultural shorthand meant to conjure technocracy, old-world bureaucracy, and a whiff of elitism. By contrast, “cities and small towns of America” is an emotional portrait of legitimacy: the real country, the country that works, the country that gets ignored. The line quietly tells listeners where they belong, then asks them to resent whoever’s implied to be governing from elsewhere.

The repeated “This President…” versus “We…” is the engine. It’s courtroom cadence, a prosecutor’s rhythm that turns policy disagreement into moral diagnosis. Obama isn’t just wrong, he’s oriented wrong, inspired by the wrong people, loyal to the wrong model. Romney’s “we” is deliberately elastic: it merges candidate, party, and audience into a single protagonist, making dissent feel like self-exile.

“Faith in government” is the sharpest blade because it rebrands a practical debate (stimulus, regulation, health care) as a character test. Government becomes a kind of crutch; “the American people” becomes a kind of church. The subtext is that trusting institutions is un-American, or at least unconfident.

Context matters: post-recession anxiety, Tea Party energy, and a Republican argument that Obama’s agenda imported European-style social democracy. Romney, often tagged as corporate and cosmopolitan, uses this folksy dichotomy to launder his own image into populism - and to make policy sound like patriotism.